Goldy

I know it’s early, but so far McCain is kicking Obama’s ass, 16 electoral votes to 3.  It’s a landslide.

UPDATE:
Oops.. spoke too soon.  A bunch of polls just closed, and now Obama leads 77 to 34.  What a relief.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
We’re watching CNN, but MSNBC has called Pennsylvania for Obama, which really puts a knife through McCain’s electoral strategy.

That said, the early exit polls that seem to be making the rounds have Obama up 4 in PA, up 2 in Virginia, up 1 in Florida and Ohio, and down 2 in North Carolina.  It’s pretty meaningless, yes, but there’s really not much else to report right now, so what the hell.

FYI, I’ll start blogging live from the Montlake Ale House at around 4PM.

An anti-Gregoire email has been making the rounds since the weekend, and has apparently gone viral in the agricultural community.  The email falsely characterizes the governor’s record on water issues, and touts an anti-Gregoire rally that never happened.

Farmers Rally in Yakima Against Governor Christine Gregoire

YAKIMA, WA – Over 100 Farm Bureau members braved strong winds and heavy rains to hold a rally in Yakima on November 1st to protest against Governor Christine Gregoire and her lack of support and action in building water reservoirs in Eastern Washington during her first term in office.

In particular, the Farm Bureau members at the rally expressed strong dissatisfaction at Governor Gregoire for her lack of leadership on several issues…

[…] During the rally, the Farm Bureau members chanted “Jay Manning must go!” in reference to Department of Ecology Director Jay Manning.

Nearly all of the farmers at the rally indicated that they would now be supporting Gubernatorial Candidate Dino Rossi because of the lack of action that Governor Gregoire and Ecology Director Jay Manning have shown in regards to building water reservoirs in Eastern Washington.

The email even includes pictures, presumably taken at the rally:

Only problem is, the rally never happened.  The image on the right is cropped from a farm rally in New Jersey, while the image on the left is cropped from a milk protest in Germany.

Dino Rossi couldn’t actually generate much support from farmers in central Washington, so he had to fabricate it.  Pathetic.

Sandeep Kaushik, Darcy Burner’s communications director, was rushed to the emergency room this morning with what turned out to be a sizeable kidney stone… a non-life threatening, yet extremely painful condition.  His primary responsibility being interacting with our local media, Sandeep has perhaps the most stressful job in the Burner campaign, and I suppose this is what comes from a steady diet of cigarettes and Maker’s Mark.

Of course, as far as the ill health effects of stressful campaign work goes, I suppose it could be worse.

Get well soon, Sandeep, and remember, like the election, this too shall pass.

I always vote at the polls around 9AM, so I have a sense of relative turnout, and this was the busiest I have ever seen my polling place.

Vote.  Vote, dammit. Vote.

Election winners like to talk about something called “the will of the people,” but what we’re really talking about here is “the will of the people who actually showed up to vote that day.”  And since there are more of us than there are of them, it should be our will that is expressed today… that is, if we all actually bother to vote.

Let’s be clear: study after study shows that Democrats almost always benefit from high turnout while Republicans benefit from low turnout.  They don’t want you to vote; that has always been their strategy.  Don’t let it be a winning strategy.

If Democrats turn out in equal or greater strength than Republicans today, Gov. Gregoire and Darcy Burner will cruise to victory.  If we stay home, the Republicans will win.  It’s as simple as that.

And at the presidential level, don’t be fooled into complacency by Barack Obama’s imminent victory, for the battle to discredit his administration has already begun.  Obama is going to need a huge electoral mandate if he’s to have a hope of turning our nation around, and so every vote counts… even those here in a West Coast state he will surely win, and hours after the East Coast declares him the presumptive president-elect.

So vote, dammit, vote.  Or shut up and deal with the consequences.

FIND YOUR POLLING PLACE:  KING | PIERCE

WA STATE PROGRESSIVE VOTERS GUIDE

NOTE:
The Pierce County polling place finder has been down intermittently.  You can find a list of polling places here.

Joan is spending the final few days of the campaign with Darcy, and apparently, she has a camera.

In their headlong race to the bottom, which will the Seattle Times shed faster?

Sad.  I can only imagine how much it would have meant to her and Obama for her to have lived to see her grandson elected president.

It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer. She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.

No doubt the hard core righties will call it a pre-election day stunt.

Obama wins, Stefan does not stop by DL to share a pitcher with me.

A couple weeks ago it appeared Darcy Burner might be cruising to victory.  A number of polls showed her with a small but substantive lead amongst all voters, and a comfortable lead with those who had already cast their ballots.  And then the Seattle Times decided to step in and play kingmaker.

No doubt Dave Reichert’s bullshit “Harvard Hoax” ad, propped up by hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal loans from his media buyer, is having an effect—Darcy’s campaign has received a number of calls from confused voters asking if Darcy actually graduated from Harvard, or even has a college degree at all.  The Times and their collaborators on talk radio took confusion over the unusual wording of Harvard degrees—essentially a niggling complaint over a lack of specificity—and knowingly gave Reichert the ammunition to lie to voters about Darcy’s extraordinary education.  And it may be working.

Essentially, if Dave Reichert wins this election, it will be a huge victory for the Seattle Times and the power of the corporate media to manipulate public opinion, and a devastating loss for those of us in the netroots who have put so much time, energy and passion into electing a qualified and competent representative in WA-08.

Please don’t let that happen.

Darcy needs our help now more than ever, and it’s time for us to leave everything on the table.  The campaign is launching a new ad today, refuting Reichert’s lies, and she needs to put every cent she can behind it to set the record straight with confused voters.  But unlike Reichert, Darcy has to pay as she goes, so if you haven’t already given everything you can, please go to Darcy’s website and contribute now.

And if you have more time than money, you can still contribute to Darcy’s campaign by volunteering today and tomorrow, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and helping with her Get Out The Vote efforts.

For the third election in a row, and with the tacit cooperation of the press, Dave Reichert is closing out his campaign by smearing his opponent.  It is time to show that people power can trump the entrenched interests of our state’s media-political complex.

In a nation that impeached a president for lying about a blow job, and in a state where confusion over the wording of a Harvard diploma qualifies as a front page scandal, you’d think our local media would jump on evidence that Dino Rossi perjured himself just days before the gubernatorial election, right?  Well… not so much.

Two new depositions of Master Builders Association board members were released over the weekend, and so far our local media has turned a blind eye, despite the fact their testimony directly contradicts that given by Rossi, and sheds new light on the Republican’s role in the ever expanding Buildergate scandal.  And no doubt the most damaging testimony relates to a phone call Rossi made to MBA President Doug Barnes in May of 2007:

LOWNEY: How long was your conversation with Mr. Barnes.

ROSSI: I don’t recall.

LOWNEY: Do you recall talking about any financial contributions.

ROSSI: That, I don’t think so. No, I don’t recall that.

LOWNEY: Did you talk about the 2008 governor’s race?

ROSSI: No.

Well, that seems pretty cut an dried. Amongst the many things Rossi couldn’t recall during his deposition was any conversation about financial contributions. But when asked whether he even talked about the 2008 governor’s race during his telephone call with Barnes, Rossi definitively replies: “No.”

Unfortunately for Rossi, that’s not the way Barnes recalls the conversation:

LOWNEY: And what other issues did you speak with him about?

BARNES: Discussed the latest wedge with BIAW’s approach to us on this funding for the governor’s race.

LOWNEY: And what did he say about that particular issue?

BARNES: Mr. Rossi didn’t have specific — he listened and talked with me about what our differences were. There was no real: Okay, here’s a conclusion, here’s an answer, here’s a — it was more just listening: What are the issues that you have?

Huh. So Rossi claims they didn’t talk about the 2008 governor’s race, while Barnes says they not only did, but they even talked about funding for it. And just as important, Rossi “listened,” which contradicts his insistence that he had absolutely no idea, during the spring of 2007, that the BIAW was raising money for the governor’s race:

LOWNEY: So in 2007 in the April, May and June time frame, did you have any idea that the BIAW was trying to create a pot of money for the 2008 governor’s race?

ROSSI: I know they were trying to come together on supporting all candidates across the state that were pro small business candidates. … It was for supporting all small business candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, and in a very general sense.

Okay, Rossi didn’t really insist that he had no knowledge the BIAW was raising money for the governor’s race, he just kinda sorta implied it by claiming the effort was for all pro small business candidates… not that legally, that is any excuse if he knew that one of those candidates might be himself.  But we’ll get to the legal stuff later; for the moment, let’s go back to Barnes’ deposition, where he further details his conversation with Rossi.

LOWNEY: And how did you describe this latest wedge issue to Mr. Rossi?

BARNES: I said it was another example of BIAW – kind of “my way or the highway” is how I typically described it – and that I had two or three major objections with what they were trying to do and that it was way too early; there’s no need for us to even be having this discussion at this point in time. And that was the extent of that.

LOWNEY: And what do you mean, “it was too early”?

BARNES: They were trying to raise funds for an election that was going to happen 15, 18 months from now.

When Rossi is asked if he knew the BIAW was raising money for the governor’s race, he prevaricates; when he’s asked if he even discussed the 2008 governor’s race during his conversation with Barnes, he says “no.”  Indeed, since the day this scandal first broke, Rossi has insisted that his numerous phone calls and meetings with MBA officers during the spring and summer of 2007 were merely intended to close the growing rift between them and the BIAW.

But as Barnes makes clear throughout his testimony—testimony that is corroborated by the official minutes of MBA meetings—the “wedge” that was causing this rift was largely focused on the BIAW’s efforts to pile up a “fund for Rossi,” and the MBA’s reluctance to earmark contributions to this fund at such an early date.

BARNES: I didn’t think that we needed to identify a specific funding source for something like this. If we wanted to contribute to a local political race or whatever, we would designate that funding source at that point in time. There’s no need to earmark funds in our budget.

Rossi also denies that he talked about the race for governor at a lunch meeting with MBA officers, yet MBA President-elect John Day, who set up the lunch, testifies in his deposition that this was the whole purpose of the meeting:

DAY:  I wanted to get the chair officers together with Dino so that we could have an opportunity to try to convince him to run for governor.

Whether Rossi’s sworn testimony rises to the level of perjury, well, I’m no attorney, so I don’t know.  But the depositions make clear that Rossi was much more involved in the BIAW’s illegal fundraising scheme than he has heretofore admitted, and that what little active participation he does acknowledge puts him and the BIAW in direct violation of WA’s campaign finance and disclosure statutes.

Rossi’s fallback position has always been that he wasn’t aware of BIAW’s efforts on his behalf and that he never helped them raise any money for the gubernatorial race, but that even if he did, that would have been okay, because he wasn’t officially a candidate at the time.  But that’s not what the law says.

RCW 42.17.020, Definitions

(9) “Candidate” means any individual who seeks nomination for election or election to public office. An individual seeks nomination or election when he or she first:

(a) Receives contributions or makes expenditures or reserves space or facilities with intent to promote his or her candidacy for office;

(b) Announces publicly or files for office;

(c) Purchases commercial advertising space or broadcast time to promote his or her candidacy; or

(d) Gives his or her consent to another person to take on behalf of the individual any of the actions in (a) or (c) of this subsection.

And even Rossi testifies that at the same time he was talking with MBA officers—conversations these same officers testify focused on the 2008 gubernatorial race and the BIAW’s efforts to raise money for it—he was indeed considering a run for governor:

ROSSI:  I was about 75 percent sure I wouldn’t run…

Of course, no astute observer of Washington state politics believes for a minute that in May of 2007, there was only a one in four chance that Rossi would run for governor, but even that admission is enough to establish that he was in fact considering a run at that time, which would have barred any participation in the BIAW’s fundraising efforts.  Indeed, under state law, the very act of coordinating with the BIAW on their “fund for Rossi” made Rossi a legal candidate, and thus made such coordination illegal.

But I’m guessing you won’t read any of this on the front pages of our local newspapers, because you know… they wouldn’t want to play politics so close to an election.

Throughout the fall of 2006 the polls showed Darcy Burner steadily closing in on Dave Reichert.  While her internal polling never showed her with a lead, several other polls showed the race within the margin of error during the final weeks, and momentum seemed to be on her side.  Even on election night, trailing by a few thousand votes, there were some experienced vote counters who projected a narrow Burner victory, with late absentee ballots shifting the race her way.

Well, it didn’t happen.  Throughout most of the district late absentees trended toward Dave Reichert, who gradually expanded his lead as votes were tallied.

In retrospect it seems clear that Burner’s momentum stalled around mid October, with the race breaking slightly toward Reichert during the final two weeks of the campaign.  No doubt there were a number of factors responsible for Reichert’s victory, but many observers credit his sexist and demeaning “job interview” ad… and the Burner campaign’s failure to adequately respond.

Will 2008 be a replay?

Once again Burner closed sharply on Reichert, with several polls showing her with a small but significant lead by mid October.  And once again the Reichert campaign has attempted to swing the race his way with a demeaning and dishonest ad.

No doubt the “Harvard Hoax” ad is effective; there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that many viewers come away believing that Burner never earned a degree from Harvard at all.  But this time the Burner campaign has directly responded with an ad of its own, calling Reichert’s lies “pathetic”, and assuring voters that she did indeed graduate from Harvard.

But perhaps the real game changer this election season is the diminishing opportunity for a game changing ad at all, when viewed in the context of the unprecedented torrent of negative advertising that has flooded our airwaves in recent weeks… much of it courtesy of the $7 million the BIAW and RGA dumped into the governor’s race at the last minute.

In the context of this tidal wave of negativity, the “Havard Hoax” ad comes across as just another ripple… just another attack ad lost in the deafening roar of a sea of attack ads.  Add to that the general distraction of the presidential race, and it becomes harder and harder for any one political ad to make a difference.  Even the NRCC’s predictably effective “she’s gonna raise your taxes” ads get lost in the noise of “she’s gonna raise your taxes” ads launched against Gov. Gregoire.

“Yeah, we know already…” the vast majority of voters must be screaming to themselves, “She’s a Democrat.  She’s going to raise our taxes.  We get it.”  Who exactly “she” is, and in what race, well, what’s the difference?

Compare that to the 2006 cycle, when the biggest race on the ticket, Cantwell vs. McGavick, had already effectively been over for weeks, and McGavick shifted toward softer ads to preserve his reputation.  In that context the job interview ad could stand out.  In 2008… well… not so much.

I’m not claiming victory or anything, or making any predictions, but I do think it reasonable to suppose that Reichert has faced a much greater challenge this year in his efforts to close out the campaign trashing Burner’s character and reputation.  And for that, the BIAW and RGA’s seemingly bottomless warchest deserves at least some of the credit.

See, it’s not just me.  Everybody from Philadelphia talks this way.

Sarah Palin:

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

That’s right, the biggest threat to our First Amendment rights is a free press.  George Orwell would be proud.  And appalled.